


Catalonia

by lynndyre



Category: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian
Genre: Book 2: Post Captain, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 12:15:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8890420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre
Summary: Catalonia exists, for Stephen, as an incorporation of cognitive dissonance.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Garonne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Garonne/gifts).



Catalonia exists, for Stephen, as an incorporation of cognitive dissonance. Home and not-home. Familiar but not the same. As they reach the border from France, both at the end of endurance, and with Jack's body and heart utterly depleted, it becomes both refuge and the sanctuary of a different suffering.

The castle still endures. Stephen acknowledges a sense of history, of attachment, to the place, but not of ownership. Neither in possession nor embodiment, the way Jack had made their rented house utterly his- their- own with shiplike immediacy. Stephen knows he himself does not inhabit places (The world. Himself.) so fully as Jack does.

How much can any man do as fully as Jack does?

There is something in that extroversion. It draws Stephen, has drawn him from the first, from that dramatic apology, confusing breakfast and joy in the mangling of his native words. Jack's spirit is the ocean, ready to take the world full on, to attempt all it has to offer, with none of the distance, the thousand myriad calculations or analyses that Stephen places between himself and events. 

Diana has something of it too. A fire. 

Stephen never used to think himself a moth. The analogy tastes bitter, and churns in him as he watches Jack's white and pink face, his bitten, too-thin body. He smiles so sweet, under Stephen's hands, even still ill, with his crowning glory all shorn away. 

The essential lie of medicine is the patient's trust. It must exist, or no action, however correct, will carry its full efficacy. There is a powerful impact in Jack's trust, for Jack believes as fully as he does everything else. And he believes that Stephen will be able to heal him, fix him as he has fixed so many others. Each time, Jack believes, and each time Jack grows well again. 

Stephen lays his hand on that face, and Jack turns into his palm. When next he wakes, he will have another dose of physic. And tomorrow, if the fever remains, Stephen will let blood again.

While Jack sleeps, while Dolors watches, Stephen wanders. By turns he follows the sheep, the trails, the birds. The grafted tree in the courtyard is one Stephen used to climb as a boy. He picks a few of the lemons and pockets them for his wanderings. The nanny goat, procured for Jack's needs, has taken a liking to Stephen. A garlicked crust, left in his pocket against future need, bears evidence of caprine mastication. Stephen scowls, but gnaws it absently regardless.

There are things in Stephen that do not bear close examination. Thoughts he is aware of, and wishes not to have. Jack's vulnerability, in the wake of debt, of Diana, pulls at both his friendship and his anger, the small ugly feelings of a small, ugly man.

Jack Aubrey is a wonder. And yet Stephen is, has been, for days upon days now, the only thing between Jack and danger. Threat of law, of war, of the brain fever that even now saps the remaining strength from his great limbs. 

He would not do otherwise. It is not a matter of owing, though Jack has saved Stephen in his turn, times uncounted. But the thought exists of that horse, tied and waiting, of things Stephen has had and is now denied, and it poisons his care, though he is the only one to feel it. 

Stephen walks, and watches for the she wolf. He has seen her only twice in all their time in the castle. Once in the long spreading shadow of dusk from the mountain, and once now, in the morning before dawn, when he has spent the long night beside Jack's bed and gone out to climb to the high spring where they crossed the border. She is thin, but less thin than before, and Stephen determines to count the sheep on his return. He smokes in the growing light, and the wolf looks up at his face for a long moment. What do wolves make of men? 

He exhales, breathes in Catalan air. The breeze and the smoke are clearing the smell of Jack and sickness from his head. A familiar sort of reek, one he doesn't mind evading for a time. He knows near every smell of Jack's body, in every state.

The wolf is gone. He squints up at the dawn, feeling the sun on his skin, sinking deep and heating him to the core, as the English sun struggles to do even in the hottest summer. 

And yet it is England he belongs to now, most strongly. No place to possess, not for him, nor to embody. But allegiance he may choose, and he has done so. England, and Jack, will have whatever he can give.

Stephen turns from the ridge, and lets his feet follow the slope back towards the castle. 

 

***

 

Jack sleeps, and wakes to drink and sleep again. He hurts, but he knows himself safe.

Stephen's hands smell of sheep. Of lanolin, softening them from their customary disinterested utility. Jack dreams of the sheep, from the smell of Stephen's hands. Dreams of Stephen, too, when the girl came, and Jack sat all unknowing of what to do, and Stephen came. There is no little girl, only the horrible confining mess of the bear suit itself, but Jack is trapped nonetheless, until Stephen comes to take him away. The turpentine reek in his dream is chased away by green herbs and possets and wool. Lanolin and lemons. Lemon water is Jack's lot, and mutton broth and pap. The goat's milk is warm and rich.

Stephen's hands are on Jack often, and sheep is better than other smells they've known. Blood. His own. His men's. Smell of corpses, or rot, or horrible preserved things in jars. 

Rosin. Surely they must smell of rosin sometimes, when Stephen and he have been playing- rosin and toasted cheese. But then, no call for Stephen's touch if Jack's well enough for his fiddle.

Sometimes Jack dreams in music. Sometimes the wind blows out his sails in soft trumpets, and he wakes conscious of the swell of a german flute, sure that if he could just reach his violin he could match the dreamlike lift of the song.

Sometimes he lies in the low Spanish breeze and feels it in notes, in musical impressions. If one could just unfocus the ears as one can the eyes...

This is Stephen's realm. And there's a sense in it, a funny kind of way it lines up, as the lines of a mathematical proof. That a castle, if Stephen owned it, would be exactly as this is. It isn't grand, and it hasn't quite all its parts, but it stands and it shelters and it makes Jack pleased to be within it. Sheep and goat and lost wolf alike.

For Jack, Catalonia is lemons and goat's milk and care, under Stephen's hands.


End file.
